Jolyon Rubinstein and Heydon Prowse revived their BBC Three guerrilla format for five half-hour episodes on BBC Two in January 2017, again hiding cameras in cufflinks and feeding falsehoods to MPs. The duo’s fictional Tory braggart James Twottington-Burbage returned, now joined by Duckface, a selfie-obsessed activist who live-streams charity hunger strikes between snacks. Hat Trick Productions stitched together studio sketches, stunts and animated gags that chased the news cycle so closely the final edit was still warm at transmission.
The segment that detonated comment pages was “The Real Housewives of ISIS”, a three-minute pastiche of the Bravo franchise showing veiled women comparing suicide-vest sizes and complaining about cramped caliphate flats. Broadcast two years after the Paris attacks, the sketch drew 280 complaints to Ofcom and front-page rebukes from tabloids, yet the regulator cleared the slot, noting the target was jihadist propaganda rather than victims. The rest of the series slipped by with lower heat: a fake arms fair pitched weapons to toddlers, payday-loan clerks rebranded as “moral lenders”, and Prowse convinced a London estate agent to flog luxury bunkers for post-Brexit riots.
No second run materialised; BBC Two quietly reclassified the order as a one-off and the pair moved on to podcasts and solo projects, leaving five episodes as a time capsule of pre-2017 national jitters.
Production Details
BBC Two / 1 Season / 5 Episodes / 2017 - Present
Main Cast
Heydon Prowse as Various
Jolyon Rubinstein as Various
Catriona Knox as Voiceover
Jo Bunting as Voiceover
Mona Yousefi as Various
Nimisha Odedra as Hadyia
